Mass mailing with UE

[Steve272190]

Hello,
As we all know the economy has us working to maximize exposure and I have a number of clients that would like to start doing mass mailings.

The developers of UE have noted in the past that the product is not up to that challenge. I wonder if it would not be time to discuss why and how we can surmount these problems?

Of course there is Constant Contact. Great product. Loads of tools and widely accepted by the world and not blocked.

But many of us like to be self sufficient and run our own servers, giving us greater access to automation etc.

So my question is, what are the problems in using UE to do mass mailings? And how can we work around any such problems?

If necessary UE could be used for only part of the goal and then hand off to other technologies.

I'm thinking I would like to be able to run mass mailing campaigns in the middle of the night so there is less server impact.

Of course the whole project will be tied to a DB and have the proper opt outs.

Possibly there will be a need to limit the amount of email accounts mailed to at a time. Maybe there is merit in one email per event? Then it would be easy to do a traceback to the recipients custom opt out string without having to put in their email address?


Anyone else accomplish this task?

[Ray Borduin]

The limitation is that many email servers can't accept email requests as fast as universal email will send them... also many service providers explicitly set a limit much lower than what that actual breaking point might be to prevent potential problems.

A solution is to contact your service provider and find out if they have any set limits to number of emails per second, minute, hour, day... then instead of sending all of your emails at once, use a recordset results set with a limited number of records... say they tell you that you can only send 100 per minute... show 100 records on the page and have a send button to send to those 100 users... then click the next button and wait a minute to send to the next 100 users.

This is a manual technique, but will work. Programatically you could probably write code to do the equivalent of this automatically by writing code by hand, but the above solution would be doable by just applying existing server behavior functionality in the correct way.

[Steve272190]

Thanks for that info Ray.

I run my own server so the limitation is set by me :)

I am glad to hear that no bottle neck will come from UE. Now it's a matter of making sure that the mailings do not result in black listing.

Then on to the automation. I really do not want a bunch of my clients clicking all day long sharing my mail server, and having to deal with these surges. Tests are in order I guess to see what impact 100 emails all sent at once do to a server.

[Sades]

i had an experience with mass mailing some time ago with a marketing company i worked with, to avoid to get you black listed the first thing you should do is set a timer to send batches of emails for example 10 emails per second, the mailing list we used at that company had over 50000 emails each list, this way it takes a bit more time but first you wont place your server under a heavy load, and second you have less probability's to get blacklisted.

[Steve272190]

i had an experience with mass mailing some time ago with a marketing company i worked with, to avoid to get you black listed the first thing you should do is set a timer to send batches of emails for example 10 emails per second, the mailing list we used at that company had over 50000 emails each list, this way it takes a bit more time but first you wont place your server under a heavy load, and second you have less probability's to get blacklisted.


Sades,
Thanks for your input.

Any idea on what was used for the timers? PHP, Javascript, Cron?